And it left me wondering if openSUSE has a plan related to
capabilities. Apparently some of the distros are moving to it rapidly
in an effort to eliminate SUID programs, but there may be security
holes in the new concept too, so it's pretty up in the air.

And my other question is where do project level design concepts like
this get discussed?

That looks more like a technical discussion which seems very appropriate.

But in this case I was hoping for a statement of direction.

ie. "The openSUSE community has decided to restrict the use of SUID by
switching to Linux Capabilities instead and is targeting the 12.0
release to have no SUID programs included in the release." would be a
statement of direction.

It seems high-level direction like this is only provided via rpmlint
telling packagers that their packages are no longer accepted.
Non-packagers have no idea.

It seems there should at least be a wiki page that tracks these types
of rpmlint enforced initiatives.